Tomas Martin @ 05-03-2008
Tor author (and sometimes Futurismic blogger) Tobias Buckell has an interesting post talking about the effects of authors giving away their novels. There has been a lot of criticism of the practice by some writers and lots of praise from other corners. But with Neil Gaiman adding his superb bestseller ‘American Gods’ to the list of books you can legally download for free, are people shooting themselves in the foot or will this bring more income in the future through increased readership?
At the moment, it looks like the practice works. Two of John Scalzi’s books are up 20% and 33% in sales since the first one was released as a free ebook by Tor. As Charles Stross has mentioned, the fact that current ebooks are as much as a few hundred grams of chopped down tree, chemical treatment, ink printing, shiny cover embossing, a few thousand miles of transportation, part of the salaries of manufacturers, printers, truck drivers and shop assistants that make up the price of a typical physical book is simply insane. And that’s not even including the price of an ebook reader like the Kindle monstrosity. So until someone comes up with a £50 reader that gives you digital books for £3, £2 of which goes to the author, ebooks aren’t a business model. But they do provide clever authors with the chance to increase their reader base. What do you guys think? Would you purchase a book after you’ve been impressed by the free ebook version?
[image is the cover of Vernor Vinge's novel 'Rainbow's End', which you can find for free online here.]
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Paul Raven @ 03-12-2007
The smoke has cleared after the Kindle’s launch (although our evaluation devices are still lost in the mail, it appears), and people have been poking through the detritus. One such person is sf author Gary Gibson, who’s been following the Kindle’s media trail quite closely … and has found a review that suggests Amazon’s new ebook reader may not be anywhere near as restricted in function as Amazon themselves may have claimed:
… the implication to some is that back-doors to the device’s software have been more or less left deliberately left wide-open. Not only that, but many of the purported limitations - you can only read books downloaded through Amazon’s website, you can’t copy books, it doesn’t work as a web browser - are, according to some, manifestly not true. For instance, the majority of blogs you purportedly have to pay to be able to read are accessible for free using RSS feeds through the Kindle’s basic web browser, as in fact are the free online contents of many of the newspapers now selling Kindle subscriptions.
Interesting stuff - though I think we’ll need some more corroboration on these points before getting too excited. And, wider functionality or not, it’s still very ugly … but I guess I could live with that.
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Paul Raven @ 20-11-2007
You’d have had to be hidden under a very large interweb-proof rock to have missed the fact that Amazon have launched the Kindle, their long-anticipated wireless e-book reader device, this week.
While we at Futurismic Towers are still awaiting our evaluation devices (which the Amazon people seem to have inexplicably forgotten to mail to us), we cannot pass judgement on the reading experience the Kindle offers - though we’d agree with the consensus that it’s not the prettiest machine ever. [Image from Engadget article]
So, in the meantime, we’ll refer you to the inimitable Nick Carr, one of the most reliable contrarians of the modern age, who points out that Jeff Bezos’s vision for the Kindle is possibly the best one for the future of books as a platform:
“… Kelly and his fellow-travelers are wrong, and Bezos is right. The only thing that will keep books great is respect for the individual author, the individual reader, and the sanctity of the book as a closed container. When that respect goes, the book goes with it.”
What do Futurismic readers think? Will e-book ubiquity save the novel, or destroy it?
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